The modern magazine kiosk is full of specialist magazines geared to specific forms of consumption: cars, computers, mobile phones. One of the great strengths of the internet is that it allows people to find the things that interest them, instead of having articles and programmes broadcast at them. It’s not surprising that one of the great success stories of the net is the search engine. People google the subject they’re interested in, most often that special interest is themselves. One way of looking at bloggers is to see them as part of this trend, as leader-writers writing edits for people like themselves.

Fortunately, the company that has come to define both sharply defined search and targeted advertising, Google, has also pioneered the news aggregator site. Google News is, I think, the newspaper remade for the net. The aggregator site with special versions for different countries (like regional editions of a newspaper) is the meta-daily, which offers the reader the diversity of a newspaper (politics, sport, business, technology, the arts and entertainment) with the added bonus of dozens, even hundreds, of takes on the same piece of news. Its expansiveness is the perfect antidote to the claustrophobia induced by sustained blog-reading. The solipsism of the blogger is balanced by the mainstream media’s documentation of a world that a diversity of readers can share. Link.